Saturday, May 15, 2010

Something to Think About

It's been an incredibly busy week and I spent the afternoon at the zoo with my three grandkids.  I'm exhausted! 

I thought I would leave you with a paragraph from a book I'm reading through for a second time, Evangelicals and Tradition by D. H. Williams.  The comment is really just a secondary thought but I thought it was aptly stated:
"Another related and unintended development that has grown out of sola scriptura is the rampant individualism common among evangelical churches today.  John Henry Newman was right when he said that Protestantism is particularly vulnerable on this score.  There are a great many Christians today who think of the Bible as the believer's Bible, not the churches Bible.  The plethora of Bible versions--the Woman's Devotional Bible, the Mom's Devotional Bible, the Men's Bible, the Couples' Devotional Bible, the Teen Study Bible, the Kids' Study Bible, the Student's Life Application Bible, and so on--lends weight to the prevailing idea that the primary purpose of Scripture is to cater to the needs of the individual and that it can be interpreted by the Christian privately just as well as within the believing community.  The number of special interest groups with their own interpretive arrangement of the Bible is just as dizzying.  One would think that the familiar admonition of 2 Peter 1:20 should be taken literally: 'Above all you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation.'  It appears, however, that this passage is claimed in a more oblique way by evangelicals as proving the divine character of Scripture, not condemning the privatization of biblical interpretation and application."  (99-100)

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